Bare metal restore to smaller disk

[Robvil]

I took a complete backup with 1.5 to usb disk. The complete size of the volume is 130GB on a 500Gb HDD.

I then tried to do a bare metal restore with the 2.0 client to a 180GB ssd disk to the same machine, but veeam says something about the backup image is not valid for restore (in manual mode). Is it not possible to restore to a smaller partition even when the data will fit to the partition?

[Dima P.]

Hi Robert,

There might be an issue with unmovable block at the end of volume layout thus shrink fails. If you are performing a volume migration try to run a defrag before backup job.

[Robvil]

Thanks. I´ll try this.

[SBarrett847]

I had to use GParted on the source disk to shrink the volume to a size that would fit. It was the NTFS secondary MFT in the centre of the volume preventing it from being shrunk to fit. GParted is able to move the MFT, and shrink the volume.

http://gparted.org/livecd.php

[Dima P.]

Stephen,

Thanks for sharing!

[simplicity]

The only thing is that if the don't have the source machine due to a hardware failure you can't shrink it. We have run into this same issue when using a competitors product as well.

But we have used gparted as well when needing to shrink the original partition past the "unmovable blocks". (transferring a machine from a SATA to SSD drive since the SSD are normally smaller then org SATA)

It would be nice to have a feature in VAW for this!!!

[SBarrett847]

Yep - I'd like this on the VAW wish list also. Veeam could market it as a storage migration too also. Lots of people transfer HDD to SSD on laptops/desktops. It might be a good introduction to Veeam to such users if VAW can make it painless.